Thailand University Comes Under Fire for Hitler Superhero Mural

Thailand’s Chulalong University comes under fire for displaying a mural depicting Adolph Hitler as a superhero.

By Rina Tzvi

First Publish: 7/14/2013, 12:25 PM

Adolph Hitler exhibit (illustrative)

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Thailand’s Chulalong University has come under fire for displaying a mural depicting Adolph Hitler as a superhero, along with Superman and Batman.

The mural, outside the University’s Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts building, has attracted a great deal of attention as passersby pose in front of the mural to take photographs, some of whom perform the Nazi salute.

“Hitler as a superhero? Is he an appropriate role model for Thailand's younger generation— a genocidal hate monger who mass murdered Jews and Gypsies and who considered people of color as racially inferior?” charged Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights group dedicated to exposing anti-Semitism and educating about the lessons of the Holocaust.

“The Simon Wiesenthal Center is outraged and disgusted by this public display at Thailand's leading school of higher education,” said Rabbi Cooper. “This mural has been on display for days nearby the University's Faculty of History building. We are outraged by those who created this travesty, at the young person posing using the Nazi 'Seig Heil' salute and appalled and disgusted by the total silence of the University's elite for the apparent failure of anyone demanding its removal.”

Last winter, Rabbi Cooper brought the Wiesenthal Center's Courage To Remember Holocaust exhibit, translated into Thai, to Bangkok's UN Hall where he joined 500 community activists, students and diplomats to stand in solidarity with 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Hitler's Nazi Third Reich.

“Perhaps it’s time that the University arranges for its faculty and students to view it as part of an anti-genocide curriculum,” Cooper concluded.